Kieval, Hillel J.

English

Bohemia - Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur der böhmischen Länder

Bohemia Band 54 (2014)468Niedhammer, Martina: Nur eine „Geld-Emancipation“? Loyalitäten und Lebens-welten des Prager jüdischen Großbürgertums 1800-1867. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2013, 340 S., 22 Abb., 5 Stammbäume, ISBN 978-3-525-31020-5.In July 1844, the German-language Jewish newspaper “Der Orient” published anarticle on political developments in Austria by its Prague correspondent. In terse,bitter language the anonymous correspondent underscored the incongruousness ofa political situation in which select, wealthy Jews were granted “privileges” (Vor-rechte) – for example, to buy houses from Christians in which to live outside theJewish quarter – while the vast majority of Jews still lacked basic “rights” (Rechte).“How insulting such a privilege, granted to but a few individuals, is to the Jews as awhole,” the correspondent observed, “is obvious.” 1 How was it, he asked, that theban on the acquisition of Christian houses outside the Jewish quarter – once held tobe virtually sacrosanct – could be lifted? Through a peculiar kind of emancipation itseemed, dubbed by the correspondent a “Geld-Emancipation,” an emancipation ofmoney. Financial considerations appeared to trump religious principle and historicalpractice, just as the same considerations managed to lift a small portion of the Jewishcommunity out of its pre-emancipation state into as yet uncharted legal, social, andeconomic waters.  It is precisely this exceptional sub-group within the Prague Jewish community –the people who no longer lived within the physical confines of the Jewish quarterduring the Vormärz years – that has attracted Martina Niedhammer’s attention in herfascinating and important new book. “Nur eine ‘Geld-Emancipation?’” represents asignificant departure from the ways in which historians traditionally have approa-ched the study of Jewish culture and society in Prague during the half-century thatpreceded formal Jewish emancipation in 1867. While its focus is on Jewish economicelites, some of whom assumed leading roles in the production and printing of tex-tiles in Bohemia, it does not present a conventional economic history; nor, by virtueof its relatively small set of actors, can it be considered social history in the usualsense of the term. For Niedhammer has narrowed her field of vision to focus on fivefamilies – out of a possible twenty or so – who, by virtue of their wealth and occu-pation (wholesale trade and industry), fall into the category of “upper bourgeoisie”(Großbürgertum): the Porges (von Portheim), Dormitzer, Jerusalem (von Salemfels),Lämel, and Przibram clans.Such selectivity, combined with the author’s determination to write neither a so-cial nor an economic history, produces a number of methodological challenges.Niedhammer addresses the most obvious one by labeling her study a “group bio-graphy.” (This is to be differentiated from “collective” biography, which is neces-sarily cumulative and comparative in perspective.) Group biographies, she argues,emphasize social networks, help to reveal loyalties, attachments, and relationships,and ultimately reconstruct the “Lebenswelten” (living environments) in which theycirculated. “Lebenswelten” are further defined as “the experiences, perceptions, and1 Der Orient, Nr. 27 (2 July 1844), p. 214.Rezensionen 469relations of the individual within a larger social structure” (p. 23). “Life worlds,”then, might also be an apt translation. The term, Niedhammer remarks, refers direct-ly to the individual and his/her embededness (Verortung) in urban space.  In identifying “Lebenswelten” as her object of analysis, Niedhammer is alsoaddressing several widely-accepted notions regarding Bohemian Jewish elites in thenineteenth century with which she takes issue. One image portrays wealthy Jews inthe Vormärz period pursuing assimilation head-on with a concomitant loss of Jewishidentity; another presumes their complete identification with German culture andpolitical domination in the Bohemian lands; and a third is that of a self-interestedelite, happy to accept privileges that the rest of Jewish society lacked and unwillingto challenge the Habsburg state regarding its Jewish policies. Niedhammer’s goal isto challenge such readings of Bohemian Jewish history precisely by focusing on thereal life social networks and attachments, the self-perceptions and local embeded-ness, of wealthy Jewish families in Prague.  “Nur eine ‘Geld-Emancipation?’” constructs the “Lebenswelten” of the PragueJewish upper bourgeoisie through a series of six chapter portraits. The first, titled“On the Jerusalem Island” (after an eponymous island on the Moldau/Vltava river)looks at the economic activity of these Jewish families, their competition withChristian entrepreneurs, their encounter with legal and bureaucratic impediments –and with the anti-semitism of their Christian competitors – and their formation of acollective self-consciousness. In the following chapter, the Sophiensaal, located inPrague’s Neustadt/Nové město, is meant to symbolize the social contacts thatoccurred outside of the house and family, the access gained by Prague’s wealthierJewish families to non-Jewish society, and their ensuing cultural and patrioticattachments. The families’ close connections to the Prague Jewish community and itsinstitutions are explored in chapter three (“At the Temple on Geistesgasse”). Thefourth chapter looks closely at the political initiatives launched by members of thePrague Jewish elite, its negotiations with the Habsburg authorities viewed in thecontext of the Court Chancery in Vienna. Chapter five, which revolves around the“Portheimka,” the Rococo palace of the Porges von Portheim family in Smíchov,explores the internal (innerhäuslich) contacts and connections among the Jewishupper bourgeoisie. The final chapter, “Nach Jerusalem!”, turns its attention to theestablishment of charitable endowments for the maintenance of the Jewish commu-nity dedicated to the memory of individual families. Its particular focus on an insti-tution for the care of small children established in Jerusalem by Elise Herz (bornLämel), in memory of her father Simon, allows for a consideration of the attach-ments of Prague Jews to Palestine as an “imagined place”.Martina Niedhammer puts forth a number of important conclusions that ought torevise conventional wisdoms regarding Prague Jewish society prior to 1867. Shepaints a portrait of an assured social group, united by strong collective bonds (and,yes, a strong sense of noblesse oblige), who were not afraid to confront their anta-gonists in both the economic and political realms. The wealthier Jews in Prague mayhave spoken primarily German in their daily lives, but they did not uniformly iden-tify with German in a national-political sense. They demonstrated, rather, “hetero-geneous national loyalties,” reflecting the reigning cultural pluralism andBohemia Band 54 (2014)470“Landespatriotismus” of the Vormärz period in general. The attachments of theupper bourgeoisie to the Jewish Quarter and its religious institutions remainedstrong throughout the period under review. Although the five families had left theJewish Quarter long before the granting of free movement and settlement in 1848,they remained connected to the Jewish community and its institutions. Some of thewealthy Jews agitated for moderate religious reform; others, like the Przibrams,favored traditional Orthodoxy. But all identified with the Jewish community “asJewish place” and considered Judaism to be a vibrant faith. Finally, in their politicalrelations with the Habsburg authorities, despite an “ostensible loyalty” to the impe-rial house, Niedhammer argues, personal documents (such as the correspondencebetween Leopold Lämel and his nephew Gustave d’Eichtal) reveal a more criticalappraisal of Habsburg policies toward its Jewish population. The families offerednumerous proposals, moreover, for the amelioration of the social conditions inwhich Jews lived. The book’s overarching concern, it seems, is to redeem the Prague Jewish upperbourgeoisie from a particular social criticism: the claim that they were primarily con-cerned, both as a group and as individuals, with social advancement and cultural as-similation, goals which they pursued at all cost. To the contrary, Niedhammer argues,the individuals who composed this social and economic elite possessed multiple andcomplex identities and sought to integrate different loyalties. At the same time, theywere solidly grounded in Prague as place and attached to its varied cultural formsand expressions. The author has made a very strong case here. If I hesitate to endorseit fully it is only because I feel she may have misread the critique offered originally in “Der Orient” and which, in the form of a question, frames her book. In 1844 thePrague correspondent had directed the accusation of “Geld-Emancipation” not atthe wealthy Jews of Prague but at the state. It was the Austrian state that offered asmall segment of the Jewish population an “ersatz” emancipation based on financialconsiderations even as it refused to abolish the discriminatory Jewish tax or allow forcomplete freedom of movement and occupation. Later in the article the writer fromPrague charged that the discrepancy between partial emancipation and discrimina-tion was based on the same set of financial considerations: The Austrian state, whilepromoting Jewish trade and industry, while allowing the confines of the ghetto to bebreached, could not afford to repeal the Jewish tax because it was in desperate needof the funds that it provided.2 The state needed to get its fiscal house in order. This is, in sum, a valuable contribution to the cultural and social history of CentralEuropean Jews in the decades leading up to emancipation, derived from a rich andvaried assortment of primary sources: ego documents of various types, portraits,photographs, and gravestone inscriptions, newspapers, testaments, governmentdocuments, association records, and more. As with any truly suggestive work, per-haps, I find myself wishing that the author had considered more explicitly its impli-cations for other contexts and other key historical narratives. What is the relations-hip, for example, between these nineteenth century elites and the Court Jews of ear-lier centuries? In terms of esprit de corps, economic innovation, connections to the2 The Jewish tax was finally repealed in 1846.Rezensionen 471court, and responsibility to the Jewish community, there appear to be many similar-ities. In what ways do our five families and others like them break with pre-modernpatterns of “shtadlanut” (intercession), state building, and economic development?Phenomenologically, the breaching of the ghetto walls by the Jewish elite in Praguesuggests a later “selective integration” (to borrow a term from Benjamin Nathans) inthe Russian empire involving Jews who, by virtue of their meeting exceptional crite-ria, were able to leave the confines of the Pale of Settlement and move to Russia prop-er, there to interact with the Russian state and society on a very different level. Canthe Habsburg monarchy prior to 1867 be said to have engaged in its own form ofselective integration? And, if so, what exactly occurred in Austria in 1867, inHungary in 1868, or in Germany in 1871? Is there a need to question the very con-cept of emancipation? St. Louis Hillel J. Kieval Die Protokolle des österreichischen Ministerrates 1848-1867. Abt. III: Das Ministe-rium Buol-Schauenstein. Bd. 6: 3. März 1857 - 29. April 1858. Bearbeitet und einge-leitet von Stefan Malfèr.Verlag der Österr. Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien 2014, LXV, 426 S. (Die Protokolle desÖsterreichischen Ministerrates 1848-1867, 3/6), ISBN 978-3-7001-7561-2. Eine „große Zeit“ des österreichischen Neo-Absolutismus waren die 14 Monate desMinisteriums Buol-Schauensteins gewiss nicht, die der hier anzuzeigende Band der„Protokolle des österreichischen Ministerrates 1848-1867“ dokumentiert. Auchbefanden sich die Minister längst nicht mehr im Zentrum der Politik, seitdem derjunge Kaiser Franz Joseph 1851/52 begonnen hatte, absolutistisch, also ohne konsti-tutionelle Hemmung, selbst zu regieren. Den Weg dazu geebnet hatte schon seinerster Ministerpräsident, als er 1849 mit der Verfassung auch das Parlament suspen-dierte. Fahrlässig oder bewusst hatte Schwarzenberg damit das Widerlager beseitigt,das einem Ministerium in der konstitutionellen Monarchie ermöglicht, denMonarchen von der Unmöglichkeit einer Politik zu überzeugen. Denn außer aufdem Sachverstand der Bürokratie beruht seine Macht auch und vor allem auf seinerStellung zwischen Monarch und Volksvertretung und der Fähigkeit, die Kompro-misse zu vermitteln, aus denen auch die monarchische Politik letzten Endes besteht.Jetzt war es nur noch wenig mehr als das Gremium, das für die Beratung vonQuerschnittsfragen und den Ausgleich von Divergenzen zwischen den Ministeriennötig war.1856/57, sieben Jahre nach dem Sieg über die Revolution, konnte der Kaiser essich leisten, Österreich während einer langen Reise sich selbst zu überlassen, um mitseiner charmanten jungen Frau in Italien und Ungarn zu versuchen, dort das verlo-rene Vertrauen in seine Monarchie wiederherzustellen. Durch ein Konkordat hatteer die Unterstützung der katholischen Kirche gewonnen, nun sollte auch dasVerhältnis zu den rund dreieinhalb Millionen Protestanten (immerhin fast zehnProzent der Gesamtbevölkerung) neu geregelt werden. Da die meisten von diesen inSiebenbürgen und in der heutigen Slowakei, also im noch nicht wieder für den öster-reichischen Kaiserstaat gewonnenen „Ungarn“ lebten, war auch das eine eminent

Niedhammer, Martina: Nur eine „Geld-Emancipation“? Loyalitäten und Lebenswelten des Prager jüdischen Groβbürgertums 1800–1867

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Niedhammer, Martina: Nur eine „Geld-Emancipation“? Loyalitäten und Lebenswelten des Prager jüdischen Groβbürgertums 1800–1867

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